Void and Compensation (My ear, my Alabama, my Monk)

Here comes Thelonious weather, all elbows and knees
and in-between notes—a virtuoso thirst
of clouds now tattering big blue and down
come colored leaves who’ve left their lives as shades.
Harbingers, the notes scurry like small children
who in their cravings tend to disfigure themselves.
My ear, my Alabama, and my Monk:
My single malt, my Talladega wren,
part winglet, part malfeasant, flirting
with the narrator and making of the riff-
raff an armada of ready sophists.
His play limns a weather of fevered unthinking.
Close your eyes. Let the junks on the river Dream
play détente, drift into view from left to right.

Michael Morse
“Void and Compensation (My ear, my Alabama, my Monk)” first appeared in A Public Space.